HCMC Blogs

Spoke to WO last Firday regarding the flaky desk issue. He suggested that I consider the COM port being poorly supported by the OS. He says that modern machines do not support COM very well and it's possible that we won't resolve the problem with the current OS/hardware. I did a bit of research and discovered that the possibility is certainly there, but as I have no really specific info about the way the COM port talks to the OS in this case I have no simple way of diagnosing the problem.

Wayne's recommendation is to rebuild the older box and see if it has the same problem. I'll get right on that.

Link: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/houghton-jan/

If you think information overload is a product of the computer era, think again. According to Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager at California's San José Public Library, "As far back as the sixteenth century people were complaining about the wide range of information they had to consume in order to contribute to society. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an intellectual revolution occurred as books and written information became more widely produced and disseminated, while innovations and new relationships in economics and the sciences emerged."

Link: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003156.php

The Dictionnaire Littré de la langue francaise in now available on-line, free, at www.littre.com. It contains more than 80,000 definitions, 200,000 citations of authors and reference works, and synonyms, conjugations of verbs, etc.

The Robert is planning to go on line, but it will not be free.

On the encyclopedia front, www.Larousse.fr has been revamped to allow contributions from readers, a la Wikipedia,but these are clearly identified by a different colour from the official contents of 150,000 articles and 10,000 illustrations or animations, which are verified and updated regularly

The venerable Quid will not come out in printed form this year, and its on-line site is being revamped to make the content relevant to different age groups, particularly school children.

Read more »

Taking a day off to use up some of the G&T I racked up during the two weeks when no-one else was around.

Started writing the DB backend for Roman Law, and had to learn a lot of new stuff. I always use the PEAR abstraction layer for DB work, so that we could shift data between mySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle if we needed to, but I couldn't get it working. I also couldn't get any useful PHP error messages out of Lettuce. I eventually discovered that I need to override two settings in the PHP config in order to get error reporting to work properly:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', '1');
ini_set('html_errors', '1');

The third line just makes the errors more readable in the browser.

Once that was sorted out, we discovered that DB.php (the PEAR DB library I'm used to using) wasn't installed. Greg got the sysops to sort that out, which they did immediately. Then I started looking at the latest documentation, and discovered that DB is now deprecated; we're supposed to be using the new MDB2 classes. This required a bit more reading, but it turns out that MDB2 has some useful features, including a factory() method which prepares a connection to the DB but doesn't actually create it until you use it, and the prepare() method, which allows you to put up some barriers against SQL injection at the same time as improving speed a little by pre-caching some queries. There's definitely a lot more to learn about this.

I got connections working, and wrote some utility functions for retrieving data from a table in the form of HTML <option> elements, then I wrote one specific function for adding a new row to the db and getting back (if appropriate) the amended list of option <elements>. This works fine, but it can be streamlined and generalized; I'll do that next week.

MT is trying to get Cocoon code he wrote on his local machine working on Mustard or Lettuce. There's some sort of a problem with the Authentication Framework, but we can't figure out what it is. The errors are different in both cases, but because all three instances of Cocoon have different versions, so it's hard to nail down. Still trying to figure it out (with Greg).

Started adding all the proofing changes for volume 17 reviews and articles, and got through all the reviews without problems, except for a lot of hassle with some non-Unicode SIL-font-based characters in one of the texts. Must remember to add a Unicode requirement to the authors' guidelines. Also discovered that we're not handling quotation marks in French language abstracts properly; I need to do this:

• Figure out how to enable the values of the @lang attribute in documents (something in the header, in P4).
• Add that to all the headers, and add the lang attribute to all the French abstracts.
• Add XSLT code to the <cit> and <q> handlers so that they insert the proper quotes when the ancestor has @lang="fr".
• Check and test.

Adding this as a task for the future.

In the process of tweaking some title capitalization, we noticed that elements below the paragraph level inside annotation divs were not being rendered at all. I eventually tracked down the problem to this line of code:

<xsl:apply-templates select="@* | * | text()" />

which I had to change to this:

<xsl:apply-templates select="* | @* | text()" />

in order to get the descendant elements of the paragraph tag to render correctly.

Also acquired some new texts from the BNL, and backed up everything to rutabaga.